Smooth vs Chunky game design

Sometimes it helps to look at game design through the "Smooth or Chunky" lens. What do these terms mean? Well, they encapsulate certain vibes. They occupy the middle ground between game mechanics and game feel.

🥛🥛🥛 Smooth is

• small numbers changing incrementally
• things being at the same level
• player-facing subsystems with modest game impact (say, situational dice roll modifiers)
• overloaded dice rolls with small results
• rounded probability curves like 4d6
• anything pre-planned
• predictable consequences, with randomness used as a spice

Smooth is like gradient descent and intricate clockwork and elegant flowcharts. Typical Smooth design elements are sensible, explicable, predictable, fine-grained, subtle, simulationist, world-associated, and introduce enough complexity as they need to be internally coherent.

🥜🥜🥜 Chunky is

• one dice that does everything
• flat high-variance probability curves (say, a 1d100 roll)
• one number that represents a bunch of things
• rollercoaster rides of remarkable successes and sudden catastrophes
• randomness underpinning creative direction
• huge sudden changes to big important things
• hefty modifiers 
• random tables

Chunky is like high stakes roulette wheels and staccato noises and refusing to erase anything. Typical Chunky design elements are simple, wide-reaching, experimental, flashy, coarse-grained, gamist, surprising, central, and do as much as possible with one thing.

Now in game design, unlike with peanut butter, neither one is clearly better than the other. It's situational.

Case study 1

I'm working on a RPG called Overzealous. In this game, you're a well-meaning elder god but your cultists are the typical bloodthirsty crazed zealots. This sets up the tension. You need to become manifest in the world before your cult tears itself apart with ridiculous behaviour.

Early conceptualisation had Overzealous revolve around large random tables, with most of the consequences falling out of those. This played fast but felt random. And it meant that I couldn't model persistent problems, like your cultists getting bored and summoning a bunch of monsters that then hung around, or continuous schisms in your cult leading to further attrition and outrage.

I Smoothed out this Chunkiness by expanding two numerically-tracked stats to five, and adding a granular subsystem for acquiring ongoing "problems" which took trade-offs to solve. The gameplay became a lot richer!

Case study 2

After these changes to Overzealous, you have three "bad" stats (Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity) which you want to keep a lid on and two "good" stats (Imminence, Cultists) which you need to get high enough that your cult can perform a ritual to bring you into reality.

In the draft version after the Smooth changes, if a bad stat exceeded 20, it's game over. The bad stats crept up slowly through various mechanisms, all at about the same pace. This increase was slightly faster than you could deal with, which you generally attempted to do by sacrificing positive stats, setting yourself back. That's Smooth design! The intention was that the player needed to find and pursue a good strategy to secure a win before a loss became inevitable.

In practise, though, my introduction of this much Smoothness created two issues. Because the changes were small and fairly predictable,

1. A skilled player could find one obviously optimal strategy, and didn't have to deviate much from that strategy for random events. This reduced gameplay scope.
2. If through poor luck, lack of experience, or exploring other options, the player's negative stats got too high, there was a tipping point where it was obvious that a loss was inevitable... but it took a long time to lose the game.

To deal with this, I eased up on the Smooth pedal and re-introduced some Chunky. I had stats go to 13 instead of 20, took out some of the cases where multiple stats all change by 1, and doubled down on cases where a single stat change by 2 or 3. Also, the ongoing problems that beset your cult (like cannibalism, diabolism, and schisms) only have a chance to come into play each turn, but are more impactful when they do.

And these tweaks got me exactly the gameplay experience I wanted for Overzealous! There's no longer one clear strategy to follow, as the feeling is more one of running around putting out fires. Now the player is tempted to push things, to e.g. just spend one more turn scrambling towards completing the ritual when their Fervour has crested 10, because the end's in sight, knowing that a couple of bad rolls might be their downfall.

New words to use

Was I thinking about Smooth vs Chunky throughout this design process? Not exactly, but I was certainly aware of what was going on with the overall vibes, and now that I've constructed this jargon to talk about it, I suspect I'll be thinking in those terms in the future.

With gameplay pretty much where I want it, I'm ready to get the visual design finished!

Anyway, that is the age-old "Smooth vs Chunky" dichotomy, brought to you by peanut butter on toast.

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

What if every D&D power could be used at will?

Seriously, what would happen?

I think that in D&D 5e:

• Resource tracking is fiddly, takes valuably game time, and isn't particularly fun.
  
• The game's built-in resource management is one of its weakest design elements. So much hinges on the long rest mechanic that resources feel all-or-nothing. Between published adventure content and the relative lack of 'living world' rules under the hood, resting tends to be either impossible or unpunished, with little middle ground, depending on the situation. The DM gets little guidance on making it work.
• Resource management decisions are only sometimes important, and seldom very engaging or fun, compared to the other decisions made during play. You learn good spells and tactics, and it's seldom important to change them. You may sometimes have intel leading to an opportunity to prepare differently, but the game isn't so difficult that doing so is necessary, and there isn't much in the way of DM guidance or built-in mechanics for getting intel into the PCs' hands.
• Most of the game's rules are about tactical life-or-death combat, and therefore the game itself is about tactical life-or-death combat (although of course not everyone plays it this way). Trying to conserve resources in combat is a big gamble. After the particularly resource-limited early levels, play styles tend to converge on 'open with full broadside' and not be punished for that.
• It is a game where characters don't just have 'powers' but extravagant superpowers, and it's highly character-focused.
• Character classes all have a fairly similarly design, considered in the abstract. They get an array of at-will small superpowers plus various rate-limited superpowers, almost all of which can be used a low-single-digit number of times between rests. Other limiters on powers (e.g. HP or GP costs) are rare.
• The game's balance is precarious and a DM needs to develop skill to tread the line between 'feeling dangerous' and 'being unfair'.

Let's say you mostly agree with these premises. I think it follows that making all D&D 5e powers at-will – that is, removing their rate limits...

• Would remove part of the game, but not an important one
  
• Wouldn't get rid of interesting choices
• Would work for all classes without changing typical playstyles
• Would lean into the existing superpowered and character-focused feeling of the game
• Would make gameplay much faster
• Wouldn't upset a perfect game balance that doesn't exist.

Spam spells all you like. Action surge on every turn. Put ki points on every attack; metamagic on every spell; enter rage or confer bardic inspiration whenever you can spare a bonus action.

This is an idle fancy – I've never seen it done. But I'd be fascinated to see how it played out. Extrapolating some consequences that seem plausible:

1. The DM could then abandon CR and offer challenges which would otherwise be completely unfair, then see what the players come up with.
2. If the DM created a 'too easy' encounter as a result, it wouldn't matter, because the power disparity and lack of resource tracking means the encounter gets settled in a fraction of the time that combat, spell-based trickery, or the various resource-conserving hedges usually take at the table.
3. The DM could alternatively keep CR but remove all the rate limiters on adversaries' resources: recharges, dailies, slots, etc. (But unlike character classes, this would affect some creatures much more than others)
4. PCs wouldn't need to keep lesser powers and spell choices for backup offense. With normal ideas of challenge abandoned there should be more situations where a particular utility spell or defence is desperately needed. That suggests that spell selection might become a more interesting decision!

Now, historically this sort of thing would lead to a worsening of 'linear fighters, quadratic wizards', but I don't think the difference would be as large in this edition of the game, at least before the highest levels. Fighters getting two actions every turn via action surge is pretty huge, for example. The biggest difference might be in high-level utility powers, the kind where you normally have one use of a valuable high-level spell slot and have to consider whether to save it for a fight. Now you could Fabricate or create a permanent Wall of stone every ten minutes, Mind blank the whole party, spam divination spells, and so on.

What other issues would you need to navigate?

• A few character powers stop mattering. For example, second-rate but 'cheap' healing features are mostly obviated by having lay on hands or a decent healing spell. You might need to introduce some 'alternative features' available to all classes.
• Some character powers would become irrelevant as the character increased in level. This wouldn't matter except that I doubt they're evenly distributed over character classes. You'd want to add a mechanic for swapping defunct powers out once you grow out of them, for those classes that don't already have one.
• There are some slightly more or less resource-limited classes, and they become slightly better or worse choices respectively as a result. I don't think this matters except for warlocks, who deviate from the overarching class design patterns. They'd keep their major disadvantage (few powers) while everyone gets a better version of their major advantage (powers usable more often).
• At the highest levels, powers (and spells especially) can become absurdly strong. But having poked around, I think only a few of them would be real trouble. It might literally just be Wish and Divine Intervention!
• If you're abandoning material costs from spells as well as spell slots, you'd want to look at the few spells that are highly constrained by GP cost: Forcecage, Clone, Sequester, Gate, etc.
• I might be wrong; maybe top-tier spellcasting really does outcompete other classes. You could make level 8-9 spells the sole exception to the 'infinite resources' rule, perhaps sticking to slots or limiting them in some other way (once per hour?).
• Rogues would now get infinite Stroke of Luck as their capstone: their attacks always hit and their ability checks always succeed. I don't think this actually outshines having infinite spells, but it might be boring.
• If the PCs' opponents also have no constraints, there might be a risk at high levels of the game devolving into win-initiative-to-win-combat, but hopefully it would lead to unique solutions.

Implications for the world

Obviously things would get absurd, especially if this is the norm for all people in the setting. But I already think the implied and official D&D settings don't actually develop most of the implications of the things that are canonically possible within them. All sorts of things (technologies, prices, lifestyles, community structures, social structures, etc) ought to look completely alien on the basis of low-level spells alone, and yet the setting (with its dramatic mixture of tech levels, dramatic mixture of society types, dramatic mixture of stakes, etc) stands unaffected.

But overall, losing even more immersion in a typical fantasy setting does strike me as a glaring issue, yes. Maybe abandoning rate limits would work in a more (post-)apocalyptic setting? One where everything is chaotic and in flux, where huge changes happen in the world very quickly, where absurdly spectacular powers are harnessed to mundane ends, and where nightmarishly powerful entities regularly make an appearance?

Quality and Quantity of Player Choices

Just some brief design musings.

Player choices are perhaps the most important component of TTRPG play. They're certainly one of the very most fundamental parts of any game.

We know that having more, and more compelling, choices means more fun when it comes to (for example):

• Spells or powers that are one-use, very limited, or come with a dramatic cost
• Systems where combat is dangerous and clever play gets you a huge edge
• Traps, in the style of play where traps are fundamentally puzzles and roll-to-disarm isn't an option
• Exploration, in an environment where there are (a) resource costs + (b) threats + (c) a goal which can (only) be accomplished here + (d) no clear-the-whole-map expectation

So a natural question to ask is: Can we improve certain game loops by adding more, or more compelling, choices?

Some areas come immediately to mind – places where many RPGs, big and small, have struggled in the past.

• Researching and investigation. In some games these are a simple matter of GM fiat, or just an in-world-time commitment plus a few dice rolls resulting in binary success or failure.
• Social relationships. In the (unfortunately common) absence of mechanical support and game structures, the need for these puts a burden on the GM. Social relationships ought to have mechanical impact on gameplay and emotional impact on the player... but all too often you hear them relegated to meaningless flavour. Some games don't really even ask: how do you live your character's life?
• Wilderness journeys. These can sometimes become somewhat performative/menial resource juggling or a matter of having the prescribed One Combat Encounter.
• Trade. When it comes to selling loot / buying equipment, some games skip past it, make it abstract or automatic, or reduce it to a haggle mechanic. Playing out the 'social encounter' with every trader isn't any better, if it doesn't involve compelling choices!
• Dying. Why not give a dying character things to do with their last breath? Or offer a decision between a slim chance to survive and using one's last strength to attempt something?
• Hacking archetypes/minigames. My impression is these often have a poor reputation even in otherwise-good games.

Some of these certainly could be improved with a greater centering of player choice.

More choices; more compelling choices

It's far from trivial to solve, of course.

Adding player choices may actually make things worse unless you meet the criteria for quality, which I would say at a minimum are:

1. The choice is interesting, urgent, or otherwise compelling to players
2. The choice has enough risk or potential mechanical impact to be worth the game time
3. The choice can't just be resolved with a straightforward calculation in terms of concrete or absolute costs, preference ordering of relative outcomes, etc
4. The choice is presented alongside enough grounded detail for the players to actually make informed decisions

Worth thinking about.